Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Week 22 - Thanksgiving

Hey everyone, sorry that I didn't email last week. I had a nice big draft all typed out but when I went to send it at a Church Building, it was completely blank, so I kinda gave up. BUT! I am writing this week, so hopefully I am forgiven.

Thanksgiving was a really slow week. We had quite a few lessons planned, and all of them except for our Sunday lesson got canceled. That was kind of disappointing, but we had a lot of fun with members (they felt bad for us walking in the snow). For Thanksgiving dinner, we went to the Salisbury home. They invited us over and at first they were planning on having us from 2 to 7, but we quickly explained that we had another family that wanted us to come over for dessert. The Salisbury's were a great family, all of their kids were adopted Japanese kids (he went to Japan on his mission), they were super funny. Sister Salisbury will talk and talk...so we just chatted for a while and then our dessert family called and they were like "When are you coming over???" It was the Watteyne's, the Bishop's family and they are basically my surrogate family in the Green Canyon Stake (they already call me son, sorry Mom). OH! that reminds me! I didn't get to tell you about my son because last week's email got deleted. His name is Elder Fortuna, he is 21 years old, he likes to write, and he is engaged to a girl on a mission in Ecuador. He is a great kid. He is awesome, and he will be a great missionary.

Anyway! Back to the Watteynes. They are fantastic. They have so many kids and they always insist on playing games when we come over (so of course I had to bring my box of games). Anyway, they helped me prank Elder Fortuna on his first day. They pretended to be less-active and anti-mormon. It was awesome because when they told us we couldn't come in I just made an excuse and then pushed open the door, which caused Sister Watteyne to almost give it away by laughing and Elder Fortuna to be completely shell shocked. So we let it go on for a while, until Bishop came home, which kinda gave it away. I knew Elder Fortuna could take it though, so he kinda just laughed it off. So yeah, we went for Thanksgiving and they wanted to play werewolf, so I narrated and they played. Then they taught us a campfire game they called "Big Buddha" it was actually pretty fun, but I'm not even going to attept to describe it. Then I taught them timeline and Coup while we ate pie. They are now obsessed with Coup and that game is now all that they want for Christmas. So yeah, it was a good Thanksgiving.

The day before, I got selected to go to a special meeting with someone from the Mission Department in Salt Lake, Brother Donaldson. We discussed getting back to the basics and putting an emphasis on proper planning. It went from 9am to 4pm and it was soooo long. However, we were all spiritually uplifted and it was a great experience. It is going to revolutionize the mission.

On Sunday, we got to speak in Bishop Watteyne's ward. He had us speak on Sabbath Day observance. So I talked about how we all make covenants to live the law of Consecration and how we should be willing to consecrate the Sabbath and set it apart from other days. I hope someone got something out of it. Bishop said it was awesome.

So yeah, other than that, we've just been trying really hard to find new investigators. I did a baptismal interview last night for the Logan East Elders and that went well. Hopefully we don't get so many cancelations this week